Roots - Urban Farm Museum Society of Spryfield
It’s a fall day with the rain just around the corner and the late-season garden is quiet, most of the plants are at the end of their season. A slight breeze rustles the seed pods and dry stalks.
For close to ten years, a group of dedicated gardeners has been nurturing the development of the Urban Farm Museum Society of Spryfield and its gardens. Through its programs, the farm serves the surrounding communities in a variety of ways: it provides an opportunity for people to get outside and to be active, it is a local source of good food, and it provides nutrition for a community that needs it. In the past three years, the gardeners have expanded their efforts into the Greystone Community where the Greystone Garden has taken root.
On the crest of a hill overlooking the garden is the Kidston farmhouse – the oldest house in Spryfield. The garden is on Kidston land; a lease arrangement has made it possible for the gardeners to once again farm some of this field which was once central to the agricultural traditions of old Spryfield.
Local lore has it that the Kidston house is full of welcome ghosts. Perhaps places really are marked by the people who live there and the things they do. Perhaps the same can be said of the garden. Throughout the growing season, a variety of programs draw families and children and community members to the gardens.
Over in the kids’ garden one can picture the joy of discovery as seeds planted and carefully nurtured by young hands, grow, eventually, into food: carrots, potatoes, garlic. Kids, hands dirty, jeans muddy, smiles as wide as the sky.
There is a seated planter to make gardening more accessible to those with physical limitations. At the height of the season it was thick with food and flowers. Looking at it on this autumn day, it is easy to picture an elderly woman (one of the self-proclaimed “Seasoned Ladies”) leaning over the flowers of summer. She spends hours there, weeding, nurturing, visiting with other gardeners. After all, a garden is a great place to connect with other people, there’s a certain quiet pace to it all.
On this autumn day, some beans still cling to the vine in the market garden. There are lively shadows here, echoes of a young woman from the nearby Captain William Spry Public Library youth program discovering the wonder of the taste of just-off- the-vine beans in the middle of summer and hollering in excitement to her friends “Hey! Come taste this! This is cool!” The joy of finding something new.
Putting the garden to sleep for the winter is a big job, some of the plants have to be dug up and stored for the winter, others cut down and composted for next year’s garden, still others tilled into the soil where they will enrich the bounty to come. This fall the gardeners will be planting winter rye as greencover for the whole garden. It enriches the soil and next spring it will be dug into the garden as it is readied for another season. On a grey-skied fall day there is comfort in knowing that nothing disappears in this garden, rather it simply changes: growing, dying, returning to the soil, coming again in the next growing season. That is the promise of it all.
With thanks to Martha Leary and Joanna Brown.